Discuss how to use the Ren'Py engine to create visual novels and story-based games. New releases are announced in this section.

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This is a prerelease, so you need to consider if you want to make a release with it. While it features many improvements, it hasn't been fully tested against a variety of hardware.

I'd like to announce Ren'Py 6.99.13, the last in a series of releases that will culminate in Ren'Py 7.

This release improves Ren'Py for creators of all levels of experience. Some of the highlights of this release are:

The two games that are bundled with Ren'Py have both been remade. Both are now in the 16:9 aspect ratio and use modern Ren'Py programming techniques. The Tutorial has been rethought, and is now structured to be a basic and in-depth class in Ren'Py, with hundreds of new examples. (The old tutorial may still be used when a translation exists for a language.)

Ren'Py now ships with the interactive director, which can be accessed by pressing 'D'. The directory allows one to edit scripts from inside Ren'Py, adding and modifying the scene, show, hide, with, play, queue, stop and voice statements.

Ren'Py now runs on the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi files can be downloaded and added to a Ren'PY release, though it's a creator's responsibility to ensure that their project runs in the limited memory available on that platform.

Ren'Py now takes advantage of Non-Power of Two (NPOT) textures to reduce memory usage, when supported on a platform. Memory usage can be reduced further by setting config.cache_surfaces to False.

The functionality of the {a} text tag, which introduces a hyperlink, has been improved. It's now possible to use a hyperlink to jump to a label, call a label, or show a screen.

The say statement has been extended to take arguments. This new syntax can be used by advanced creators to provide additional information to a say statement.

Translations of the launcher to French and Brazilian Portugese have been added, while the new tutorial is also available in Russian.

In addition to these, dozens of minor improvements are mentioned in the changelog.

So, this is it. This is the first prerelease of Ren'Py 6.99.13, which I hope release unchanged as 6.99.99 7.0.

There is one known issue on this, which is that on a ten year old computer, dissolves do not work. This is due to the new Non-Power of Two texture support, which saves memory. While I plan to fix it, if people could try this release on their older hardware and tell me if dissolves do not work, I'd appreciate it.

This release has not been thoroughly tested on the Mac or Raspberry Pi platforms yet. I need to rewire some things to test under the Raspberry Pi, and my Mac has been having problems. (I plan to replace it tomorrow, thanks to the generous Ren'Py sponsors.)

Incredible thanks go to everyone who tests these prereleases. Already, I've had multiple people sending me reports that have improved Ren'Py. It's the support of the community that makes it possible for me to make an engine like Ren'Py and give it away for free. So thank you in advance for the time spent testing this release.

Supporting creators since 2004(When was the last time you backed up your game?)

Older hardware
The R300 and R400-based cards (Radeon 9500+ and X500+) are incapable of generic NPOT usage, despite allegedly supporting OpenGL 2.0 (which requires full support). These cards only allow you to use NPOTs if the texture has no mipmaps.

NV30-based cards (GeForce FX of any kind) are incapable of NPOTs at all, despite allegedly OpenGL 2.0 (which again requires NPOTs). It will do software rendering if you try to use it.

A and B are not placed in the layout, they're placed in a fixed that also contains the layout, and wind up on top of each other. This is a case of Ren'Py detecting a condition that has always been erroneous - I don't see any case in which this could ever have worked right.

Supporting creators since 2004(When was the last time you backed up your game?)

This pre-release looks excellent! I really like the new tutorial and some of the new functionality supported by Renpy looks very useful. I'm still a novice at this, but it is a very impressive framework. PyTom -- thank you very much for creating this and keeping it going!

I've updated the prerelease to fix all of the issues I know about. These include:

* There's now a check to see if the Ren'Py launcher is running from a read-only mac drive image. If so, we ask the user to move the Ren'Py folder.

* The use of genderize.io to guess genders for placeholders has been removed, at least until Ren'Py gets SSL support.

* An issue with saving screenshots in non-ASCII directories has been fixed. In the case where the screenshot fails, we report the error to the player.

* The clip rectangle is made very slightly bigger than it should be. This fixes a problem that would manifest itself as vertical or horizontal lines, in some cases (like buttons and bars that are being tiled.) The problem was that we'd compute the dimensions twice, in slightly different ways, and that could cause a problem due to rounding in the computer when the clip rectangle was slightly smaller than it could be, leading to these lines.

* The Russian translation has been updated. (So has the Pig Latin translation that I test with.)

* There have been a number of minor fixes to the tutorial game.

* Render-to-texture textures are now created in a mode that is compatible with having a Non-power-of-two (NPOT) size. This doesn't matter much on modern hardware, which support NPOT in all modes, but it fixes problems experienced on netbook-level hardware.

* The windows .7z.exe file has been updated so it can properly decompress itself.

* An issue that could cause a small size to happen when the xmaximum or ymaximum of a window or button is a float has been fixed.

* ATL issues relating to the new single-frame behavior have been fixed.

Thank you to everyone who tested - their bug reports found many of these issues, making for a far better Ren'Py release. I'm about to bump this up to a public pre-release. To be honest, it's probably better than 6.99.12 at this point, but I want more feedback before I make the final release.

Supporting creators since 2004(When was the last time you backed up your game?)

After updating to 6.99.13.2808, I got this error when I tried to build a distribution:

I'm sorry, but an uncaught exception occurred.

While running game code:
Exception: Possible infinite loop.

I got this error too when creating a new project. I erased that project and then created a new one, and it worked fine. I'll update if it does occur again I'll post the full traceback just in case.

UPDATE:
The error seems to occur when you try to make a project with with name in all uppercase. I was trying to make a project in spanish language, if that helps. English seems to be working no problem, so I figure it has to do with the translation. Here's the traceback:

It is now possible to create a projects.txt file in the projects directory. If this file is present, Ren'Py will consider each line in the file to be the full path to the project, and load those projects as if they had been placed in the projects directory.

iOS builds properly.

Android includes the unicodedata modules, like the other platforms do.

Looking has been fixed to work on android.

An issue with Movie displayables has been fixed. The issue would manifest when switching the preferences to disable movies off in the menu context, and then returning to the main context.

Ren'Py will log errors loading the persistent file.

This fixes a regression where persistent files saved by 6.99.13 could not be loaded by 6.99.12 and earlier versions. While this compatibility is not guaranteed, it's nice to have.

There have been several fixes to the interactive director. The director will no longer let you try to add a line in a place Ren'Py can't accept. It allows a line to keep its attributes even if those attributes correspond to a placeholder and not an image. Reloading the project was slow when the director was enabled. Now it's much faster, as scanning files for lines is deferred until the lines are required.

Infinite loop warnings, like those above, are prevented when a process takes a long time to run.

The Simplified Chinese translation of the launcher has been updated.

Supporting creators since 2004(When was the last time you backed up your game?)

I received an error related to missing files for an imagemap defined with auto file names, but it appears to be improperly formatted in Ren'Py itself. A TypeError is returned rather than a proper error message.